31st August 2020
Cool clear-sky morning of almost-September;
Wind, at last, only fresh after many gale days:
Sea once again just lively, having been
Wrath-steepened truly lethal.
This, a frisson hour of countless blues and blue-greens;
When a painter would, if they magically could
Bring along every one of those
Third-rack-down oil colour tubes
Their eyes always covet in the art shop.
Yes: all those expensive formulations, every one
That common sense can’t justify:
So not the Ultramarine and sister Deep, or Cerulean,
Or Cobalt, or Prussian, or Indigo
Which all get palette-placed each session –
But the exotics of other chemistries:
The Pthalos, Monastrals, Chromites, rare-bird Cobalts,
Manganese hues, even endangered Cadmiums…
Why?
Why this sudden colour-lust,
The heart-pounding wish that every Winsor and Newton
And Rowney, Sennelier, plus Schminke of those spectral ilks
Was grabbable, this particular morning?
Because the motivation, at this particular moment,
Is not greed, but need:
At this super-natural hour, today,
Nature is displaying every of those colours
Out there, in the bay.
And your artist, if granted their macabre wish
To be octopussified with arms, all handed left or right,
Would set up instanter with board or canvas
Here on this cliff path, and,
‘To hell with brushes!’, palette only held from custom,
Would squoodge at once from seven colour-crammed tubes
Parallel fat resinscent pipings of pure gleamy pigment
Perfectly matching the patternings out there
Of sun patches, catspaws,
Cloudlet shadows, tidestreams,
Roughslick water above shallowskulking rock reefs,
Cliffs reflecting where the breeze can’t reach –
All such things as being so generously thrust at our eyes
By the Time of Now’s light…
For this is a Colour Festival all too brief:
Nature has staged it between our quite early stepping out
And the Holiday Lot appearing –
By when, the Sun’s steepening
Will have swept this spectrum-chart variety away,
Obliterating it by a bland overpainting:
The decorator’s uniformity
Of a another, calmish, late summer forenoon.
© Christopher Jessop 2020
